Page 32 of Fallen Heir

He ran a hand through his hair, pacing. “We need to bring in Nic. If anyone can trace what he’s covering up, it’s her.”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

Ben stopped cold. “You serious?”

“I don’t want to bring in anyone else until I’m sure what we’re up against,” I said, voice low. “Right now it’s just us. We figure it out—then we pull Nic in. If we need to.”

Ben stared at me, jaw tight. “You’re gambling with a hell of a lot, Jax.”

“I know,” I said. And I did. But until I knew exactly what we were walking into—and who Alex Cox really was—I wasn’t ready to bring anyone else into this war. I trusted Nic with my life. But something about this… It felt like the calm before a war we hadn’t prepared for. And I wasn’t ready to pull her into it. Not yet.

Ben’s eyes narrowed. “The worst thing about all of this, Jax. If Cox is the one we can see… who the hell is the one we can’t?”

I looked back at the photo. Same face. Same calm eyes. Only now, we knew his name. And somehow, that made it worse.

Alex Cox.

A name that should’ve triggered something. A warning. A history.Anything.Ben and I had been doing this long enough—we’d seen the worst the world had to offer. Drug lords, traffickers, black market fixers, old money wrapped in blood.

We knew the players. Wealwaysknew the players. We’d even known of Savannah’s father, but we didn’t worry about illegal drugs. We wanted the scum that took women and children to buy another mansion in Ibiza. But we didn’t know Alex. And that’s what made him lethal.

“He doesn’t get his hands dirty,” Ben added quietly. “He doesn’t have to. He gets others to do it for him.”

Of course he does.That’s what men like Bruce surround themselves with—ghosts in suits.

Clean records. Dead eyes.

He was like smoke—no fingerprints, no sound, no scent. Just a presence you didn’t notice until it was already choking you. And by then? It was too late. You were already dead. You just didn’t know it yet.

I leaned over the table, pressing both palms into the edge like it might ground me.

But it didn’t. It only made the burn in my chest sharper.

I checked my phone for what had to be the hundredth—no, thousandth time that day.

Still nothing.

I typed out a second message. Then erased it.

“I’m here if you need me.” Delete.

“Please just tell me you’re okay.” Delete.\

“Was it Bruce?” I typed, then stared at the words. My thumb hovered over the send button like it might detonate something. Delete.

I couldn’t send her the last one. But I wanted to.

Hell, I wanted to send her a hundred messages.

I wanted to tell her everything—about her mother, about her father, about the empire he built in blood and the lies she’d been forced to live inside. I wanted to explain why I was watching her. Why I knew more than I should. Why this wasn’t just a job or a favor or a fucking pretend arrangement anymore.

But I couldn’t. Not just because I didn’t have all the pieces yet…But because I knew that one wrong word would break whatever fragile trust we were building.

And if I lost that? I’d loseher.

So I settled on silence. It was safer. For both of us.

The only reason I hadn’t shown up at her door already was because I’d had eyes on every camera feed in that building. She hadn’t left. Not once.